New Discovery Suggests Humans Left Africa Tens of Thousands of Years Earlier
They may have even taken a different route than previously thought
Hiya!
I don’t have any space to waste, and today’s newsletter is already a little longer than usual, so we’re diving into today’s topic head first. Recently, an international, multi-disciplinary team has completed its third excavation season in the Sultanate of Oman’s deserts and has announced the discovery of a remarkable range of unique artifacts from several periods of human occupation. Some may even push back the timeline of the first human migration from Africa by tens of thousands of years.
Updating our migration timeline isn’t very revolutionary, though. There is no permanently set timeline for our prehistoric past. It’s more fluid and changes each time new information is discovered. What is interesting, however, are the excavation’s unique findings and what they can tell us about how our ancestors lived shortly after leaving Africa.
The Sites
The Institute of Archeology of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic is leading a team of 21 geologists and archeologists from 10 countries, and they plan on returning for a fourth time to the deserts of the Sultanate of Oman in 2024.
If you don’t know (I sure didn’t), Oman is a small country sitting on the southeastern coast of the Arabian Peninsula, and shares land borders with the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Yemen, and Saudi Arabia.
The archeologists are concentrating on two sites, one in the Duqm region of central Omen and the other in the Dhofar Governorate in southern Oman along the border shared with Yemen. Today, the areas are mostly desert dry, but over the millennia, there were periods called green windows when the desert became a wetter climate, making the current deserts more welcoming for human settlements.
One such green window is thought to have occurred around the time humans migrated out of Africa, which made the Arabian Peninsula an appealing migration route into Eurasia.
So far, the researchers have uncovered tombs, ancient stone tools, eggshells of an extinct ostrich species, an old riverbed, and a cluster of stones some archaeologists have dubbed an “Arabian Stonehenge.” After extensive testing, some of what the team found is believed to date between 300,000 to 1.3 million years ago, which is thought to be around the first human migration out of Africa took place.
I won’t delve into everything the team found, or we’d be here all day. But I’ll tell you more about a couple of particularly interesting ones.
Triliths
At the Dhofar site in southern Oman, near Yemen, archeologists discovered triliths, also known as trilithons. I’d never heard of such a thing before, but triliths are believed to be ceremonial stone monuments made of at least two long stones standing upright, with a third laying across the top, similar to Stonehenge.
Other times, as is the case for the ones discovered in Oman, the third stone stands upright with the other two, so the tops of all three lean together to create a pyramid shape. The team found clusters of triliths, all in a line, made of stones ranging between 1.5 and 2.6 feet (50 and 80 cm) tall, with square-shaped boulders and large fireplaces arranged nearby.
With the help of satellite imaging, the team has uncovered a total of “554 trilith sites consisting of 2162 trilith clusters.” Current estimates are that the triliths were constructed, or at least used, during the Late Iron Age period (200 BCE to 400 CE), but radiocarbon dating and spatiotemporal analysis will help scientists learn more and may even untangle ancient human settlements throughout southern and central Oman.
Aside from an exact date range, the purpose of the triliths and the people who constructed them remains a mystery.
“Triliths are one of the great mysteries of Arab archaeology,” leader and coordinator of the expedition, Roman Garba, at the Institute of Archaeology of the Czech Academy of Sciences said, “The most famous trilith or trilithon monument, as a category, is Stonehenge. Arabian triliths have probably similar function linked with rituals, but are smaller, and were built in different time.”
Tomb and Engravings
At the second excavation site, in Duqm, the team uncovered a Neolithic tomb composed of two circular burial chambers dating between 5,000 and 4,600 BCE. Inside, experts found skeletal remains of several dozen individuals.
In a press release about the finding by the Czech Academy of Sciences, Alžběta Danielisová from the Institute of Archaeology, Prague, explains:
“What we find here is unique in the context of the whole of southern Arabia. A megalithic structure concealing two circular burial chambers revealed the skeletal remains of at least several dozen individuals. Isotopic analyses of bones, teeth and shells will help us to learn more about the diet, natural environment and migrations of the buried population.”
In the meantime, near the tomb, the team spotted a collection of over 500 unique rock engravings spread across 49 rock blocks. The various styles and varying degrees of weathering deliver a pictorial record of human settlements between 5,000 BCE and 1,000 CE.
Some of the engravings resemble camels, donkeys, horses, and turtles, but there are also around 200 inscriptions that have yet to be deciphered but appear to be written in South Arabic script.
Stone Tools From First Human Migration
Archeologists also discovered stone hand axes at the Dhofar site, where the triliths were found. Dating put the axes between 300,000 and 1.3 million years old when the first human migration out of Africa was thought to have occurred.
Further testing using luminescence dating will tell experts when the stone axes were buried and how the landscape was shaped at the time. But we’ll have to wait for the results. Still, using previous research on earlier Stone Age tools from southern Oman could help the team chart the spread of prehistoric settlements and migration from Africa to Eurasia.
Along with the tools, the Dhofar site has massive dunes, some over 980 feet (300 meters) high. Miraculously, while excavating the dunes, archeologists discovered eggshells of extinct ostrich species and an ancient riverbed from when the climate was significantly wetter during a green window.
Ultimate Goals
The ongoing research in Oman by the Institute of Archeology of the Academy of Sciences is part of a much larger project by Viktor Černý, an evolutionary anthropologist at the institute. Černý’s research seeks to understand the bicultural interactions of populations and their adaptation to previous periods of naturally occurring global warming.
In the press release, Černý said:
“The detected interactions of African and Arab archaeological cultures characterise the mobility of populations of anatomically modern humans. It will be interesting to confront these findings also with the genetic diversity of the two regions and create a more comprehensive view of the formation of contemporary society in Southern Arabia.”
In the same press release, Garba, the leader and coordinator of the expedition, said:
“Our findings, supported by four different dating methods, will provide valuable data for reconstructing the climate and history of the world’s largest sand desert. Natural conditions also shaped prehistoric settlements, and what we are trying to do is study human adaptability to climate change.”
Perspective Shift
Global warming is only just beginning for us in modern times. My brother and I were just discussing how expensive basics, like food, are. He thought it was because of corporate greed, false inflation, or maybe the war in Ukraine. While he’s right to a degree, there is another, bigger, but less discussed reason food and even energy costs are so high—global warming.
The increased droughts, floods, and storms are wreaking havoc on our crops, causing food scarcity to affect even wealthy societies. Mixed with our poor global diversity of goods—for instance, Kansas and Oklahoma are top wheat producers, their cherished crops are being decimated by climate change.
As far as we know, each time global warming has occurred in the past, it was due to natural causes, whereas ours is human-made and coming about faster and more intensely than ever imagined. Still, I wonder how the one we’re facing will compare to the ones our prehistoric ancestors faced. Will ours last longer? Be more severe or less? Either way, it’s a good idea to understand how previous generations of our species survived.
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